


Not Rika, Right?

by IAmWhelmed



Category: Mystic Messenger (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Good End, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-07
Updated: 2017-01-07
Packaged: 2018-09-15 14:13:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9238511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IAmWhelmed/pseuds/IAmWhelmed
Summary: "The room fell silent, again. It was funny how three words she’d said so often to him, something she thought she’d understood before, could be breaking her the way she always worried it’d been breaking him. He was too quiet for her, too quiet and his hands were too tense and he wasn’t moving." Alternate Good End to Yoosung’s route. MC meets the guests at the big event, but some old attendees spark the idea in MC’s mind that maybe, just maybe, she could never fill Rika’s shoes, and trying will only bring disappointment to everyone around her. Maybe leaving the RFA before that happens would be the best idea...





	

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so this is actually a one-shot I promised my friend that I’d do a few months back, but I haven’t gotten around to it until now. She’s such a great beta reader and I’d be hard pressed to find somebody who knows writing like she does! <3 Thanks, girl!
> 
> My first MM fanfic. I haven’t completed anybody’s route but Yoosung’s best one, so please keep that in mind as you read! >~< This is an alternate good end to his route, one where he and Seven don’t confront Unknown and Yoosung doesn’t nearly lose a damn eye! How that works? I have no idea. That’s just what’s going on here.

They’d all said the same thing to her; it was in a different way each time, other words—same drift. She supposed she shouldn’t have been too surprised, right? After all, it was what she’d been repeating to Yoosung for the better part of a week.

She wasn’t Rika.

She said it before, a million times, because she wanted what any self-respecting human being would want: to be loved not for the old life Yoosung had been so convinced she was offering, but the new life she really was.

But now she was standing in the middle of a ballroom filled to the walls with strangers who carried pockets heavy with cash, and they were all looking at her the way she felt the entire rest of the organization had been—a newcomer, a rookie coordinator, a stranger who’d stumbled into one of the most stressful jobs she’d ever had.

Above all else, they looked at her like a replacement for Rika; Yoosung looked at her like a replacement for Rika.

_“You weren’t what I was expecting”_ said one guest. _“How fortunate they found someone to do such important work”_ said another. Her stomach had swelled with butterflies, and she might have smiled had the guest she’d been speaking to not added: _“Her eyes were much larger than yours are, dear. They were always filled with such hope…”_

The interaction left a bitter taste on her mouth, inching somewhere between the back of her tongue and the tip of it, dried because her mouth had been left hanging open, searching for a response that never came to mind. She stood tall, with her hands folded in her lap, still as the ice sculpture Jumin had all but demanded at one point. People moved around her, faces with names she couldn’t place, voices of the other RFA members floating somewhere in the distance. Her head fell low, fingers clenching and unclenching, twisting around in her dress and hiking it up unintentionally.

She was not Rika. She couldn’t fill that void in the hearts of her friends, or even the man she loved: she was useless. _A total stranger, waltzing in and taking over a loved, respected woman’s work?_ She’d been fooling herself. Everyone had been so kind, she must have gotten wrapped up in it all, tricked herself into thinking she could ever come close to holding a place in their hearts the way Rika had. She’d heard stories about the kindness Rika showed, the compassion and the willpower and the drive to be somebody amazing—all under the impression that she wasn’t already.

But she’d captured the affections—the love, the friendship, the loyalty—of everyone around her; Rika truly had been one of a kind.

The stranger that’d imprudently taken her place was not.

There were things she knew she could have done better, things that she knew Rika might have handled with no problem. She’d driven some of the RFA’s older guests to brush the party off, stick their noses in the air and run for the other direction. Rika could have convinced them to come, she was sure. Rika was beautiful and strong and smart and dedicated and she just couldn’t—she could never—measure up to her.

Truly, that was why she’d continued telling Yoosung she and Rika were different. Some part of her, deeper than she’d ever dared to dig, knew she’d only disappoint him. _She’d eventually disappoint all of them. They’d all come to realize the newest member of RFA was a cheap knockoff version of the woman they’d all admired, and she’d have to hear it for real—see it for real._

_“It’s been nice talking to you,”_ she could almost see Yoosung’s tiny avatar popping across her smartphone’s screen. _“It’s just that, I think I got ahead of myself. You aren’t really… what I thought you’d be.”_

Jumin and Jaehee might agree, Jaehee softer than he’d inevitably be about it. _“She certainly is different, isn’t she?”_

_“She did good work, but I doubt she can keep it up the way Rika did.”_

Zen and Seven might try to jump in and say something to stick up for her, but the truth would be, certainly, that behind all of those words, they’d agree.

V wouldn’t have much to say on the matter, probably—if he responded at all.

She grinded her teeth. No, she was being petty. She knew they all had their own struggles; V was no different. _Rika probably wouldn’t have sunk so low. Rika would have worked harder to become better and rise to the place she wanted to be._ She wanted to do that, too—she just knew, no matter how hard she worked, she could never be her. Jaehee would see it, Zen would see it, Seven would see it, Jumin and V would see it…

Yoosung would, too, and he’d realize he was never really in love with her.

The red carpet beneath her feet grew darker; tads of red darkened like small pelts of rain, falling along the soft floor. She was crying, salty tears running down the top bones of her cheeks, along the bridge of her nose, and falling away because she didn’t want anyone to notice her wiping at them.

_“The last party was much classier…”_

_“I did hear this was put together in a week…”_

_“How irresponsible…”_

It was getting harder to breath.

_She was a scam artist, a con—a fraud._

Her shoulders began shaking under the weight of every crushing realization, every painful way she could imagine being kicked from the organization she’d truly, honestly come to love. What was she to do? It was going to come, no matter what. She’d mess up something big, something Rika certainly would have gotten right, and then the world that’d started to surround her would come crashing down in fiery, lung-choking masses. She couldn’t take that. She couldn’t deal with seeing Yoosung’s face light up her phone less and less, hear the passion in his voice begin dwindling as he realized just how far below Rika she was.

She couldn’t do this… _She couldn’t do this!_

She took the side exit out, the tall metal door that was supposed to be for emergencies but she’d find her way home from there.

She reached inside of her purse, missing her phone again and again because her hand wouldn’t stop trembling.

 

 

“I can’t find her!” Yoosung was beginning to panic—he knew it, and Jaehee certainly knew it. She didn’t look much better than he did, he thought. Her glasses had to be readjusted every few seconds, and the tie around her neck, usually so elegant and neat, was loosened around her throat. She sighed and turned to meet Jumin, who was approaching from the hallway, hands folded behind his back.

“Please tell me you found her.”

Jumin exhaled and hung his head. “I’m afraid not. Has there been any word from Seven?”

“He and Zen haven’t checked back in yet, but I’m sure they will soon.”

Yoosung swallowed hard, reaching for his phone, which had been stuck haphazardly in his back pocket as he’d rushed to get to the event. Where could she have gone? She’d worked harder than anybody to make RFA’s first event in years something unbelievable; he just couldn’t understand! He opened their shared app as quickly as he could, hoping maybe, just maybe, there’d be a message there from her, telling him she was just picking up last-minute preparations for some reason, or maybe taking care of some troublesome drunken guest—anything. He needed anything, just something so he knew she was all right!

When her avatar (not quite as pretty as the real thing, he’d noted when he first saw her welcoming the guests) popped up on his screen, Yoosung felt the anxiety in his chest release, leaving only the butterflies that floated around, growing in numbers with every conversation they shared. The smile that came, the one he knew he’d furtively reserved for her, began to inch across his face. “Ah, she was online a little while ago. I’ll see what she said.”

Jaehee heaved a breath, leaning on the backs of her heeled shoes. “What a relief! With all of the commotion recently, I was worried something might have happened to her.”

“Seven did say he took care of it…”

Yoosung had tuned them out. All that mattered was seeing her again, because he hadn’t gotten the chance to kiss her just yet and it would have been a horrible end to the day if he didn’t get to. He’d been looking forward to meeting her for days, but every hour that’d past felt like years and decades and centuries. Chatting with her was good enough to tide him over, but his arms were starting to feel heavier and heavier, and his heart carried a similar sentiment. Words were nice, but touch was what he’d desired. Yoosung opened up the chat, eager eyes falling along the last messages and scrolling down to the bottom.

_Sorry._

His heart stopped cold.

 

 

She’d thrown as much as she could into her purse—things she’d purchased for her stay in Rika’s apartment. She cringed; the guilt continued piling on, growing worse and worse the more she thought about every little thing she’d done wrong. Who was she to take the apartment? Who was she to take Rika’s job and walk into her shoes like her life was hers now? She wasn’t Rika—she really, really wasn’t Rika.

She choked on her tears, wiping at them furiously because she needed to be able to see, dammit!

Her purse wasn’t very big, certainly not big enough to fit everything she wanted to. She just couldn’t bring herself to take one of the suitcases she’d seen lying around in Rika’s closet. Sure, she wanted memories of her time as a member of the RFA, but she didn’t plan on stealing anything else to keep them. _She’d taken enough._ She kept telling herself she should have been eager to leave, kept telling herself that she was the only living thing in a dead space, and she was breathing in stale air and she shouldn’t have been there to begin with.

She glanced at her phone, buzzing away on her—Rika’s—bed. It’d been going for the better part of fifteen minutes, avatars of all the people she’d grown to love so much lighting up her screen, some messages in all caps and others calmer. She supposed her message had been cryptic. She figured she’d send another one before she walked out the apartment doors for the last time, just to let everyone know she’d be fine and that they should carry on without her. Part of her wanted to see Yoosung again, just one last time, but she didn’t know if he’d already seen the messages or if she’d be able to explain why her face and hands were slick and wet. She paused as she reached over to grab her phone, pausing as the notifications seemed to roll to a halt. Rubbing at her eyes with her other hand, she pressed the home button and entered her password.

She should have just ignored that Unknown user. She should have just left it alone and undownloaded the app and let the rest of the day pass because she was in more pain because of that bastard than she had been in a very long time.

The most recent message was from Seven, simple lowercased text beneath paragraphs of bold, massive letters from Zen. Jaehee and Jumin and V were mixed somewhere in there, but the walls of text were instinctively distracting.

_open the door_

Someone knocked, and she bit down on both of her lips to keep the squeal she felt coming quiet. Her phone flipped in the air, and she only very nearly dropped it, bottoms of her palms catching the edges just before it fell. The knocking came again, more furious and urgent. She turned around slowly, eyeing the door up and down as if she could see the person behind it. Her phone buzzed for a second time, and it was still Seven and still the same message but the box was bordered by light red strokes.

Cautiously, walking on the tips of her toes as though she could pretend there wasn’t a person in the brightly-lit apartment, she pressed one hand to the knob and turned.

Yoosung was standing on the other side, hunched over with his hands at his knees, gasping and wheezing and choking. He winced at her shoes, covered in dirt and a little torn because she’d ran all the way home, then let his gaze trail along her body until he met her face.

He grimaced, eyes swelling at the edges.

She wasn’t expecting him to spring into her, sending her backwards on her shuddering feet until she was balanced enough to keep the both of them from toppling to the floor. His arms wrapped firmly—steadfastly—around her, and she all but felt the squeeze of his hands demand that she not move. He was freezing to the touch, skin burning against her own, sending shivers down her neck to her toes. She froze.

“Don’t do it! Don’t you dare leave me, too!”

“Yoosung-!”

“No! You can’t! I won’t let you! I’ll stay right here by your side! I won’t let anybody hurt you—even you!”

It occurred to her, then, what her one-worded apology might have looked like to somebody like Yoosung, what he might have thought and what the others might have thought; she felt tears pricking the corners of her eyes again.

“I- I wasn’t going to…! I was-!” She whimpered and placed both hands at his shoulders, trying to muster the strength to push him away even when she knew it wasn’t coming. “I'm just… leaving the RFA.”

Yoosung paused, trembling body tensing. She wasn’t sure what that meant.

“You-?” His voice hitched. She swallowed and stood straighter, clenching her jaw; she wasn’t sure if she was trying to be brave or tough, but she was trying nevertheless. “What?” Yoosung pulled away, hands at her arms, pressing her, eyes wide and wild and bursting in a frenzy. “Why would you do that? The party was a huge success!” He went to say more, but he must have seen the scrunch of her nose and the downward tilt of her chin because he fell silent, eyes softening the longer they stared at each other. He took a step closer. “I know you were in a lot of danger the last few days… I know it was scary.” His hands loosened at her arms, hold like a lock coming unlatched, thumbs rubbing the skin there as though he’d hurt her—he hadn’t. “But Seven is keeping an eye on you—and I am, too! Please, have faith in me to protect you!”

“That’s not it…”

“Then what is it? Please, tell me!”

“I’m not Rika!”

The room fell silent, again. It was funny how three words she’d said so often to him, something she thought she’d understood before, could be breaking her the way she always worried it’d been breaking him. He was too quiet for her, too quiet and his hands were too tense and he wasn’t moving. Her heart dropped from her chest again, sinking to the bottom of her stomach and sitting there like a heavy bag of sand. She let her eyes fall; she couldn’t look at him, not now.

“I know that... I know you’re not Rika. What I have with you—it’s completely different.”

She shook her head and let it fall against his chest, sniveling and shuddering. He wrapped his arms around her again, hands once freezing now warm against her bare back. He enveloped her like a fresh blanket, heat washing over her shoulders, soft and gentle like a kind hand; he was kind, she knew, to deal with her like this. “I can’t compare to her. Everything I’ve heard about her is so amazing,” she choked and squeezed her nails into the skin of her hands, fists tight enough she was sure she’d see red when the muscles relaxed. Yoosung stayed silent still, and she wasn’t sure if that was a good or a bad thing anymore. “I know I’m not her; I never could be. I’m just going to disappoint everyone—I’m going to disappoint you. I couldn’t take it,” she choked and clenched her fists tighter, feeling the tips of her nails beginning to break skin. “I couldn’t take it if Yoosung started to hate me…”

“Hate you? No! There’s no way!” He pulled her back again, hands sliding down the length of her arms to fall over hers, his fingers grazing the skin all the way gently, softly. He was handling her like a fragile doll, and she supposed she might have been at the moment. She wouldn’t look at him; he couldn’t see her face when it was wet and red and puffy. “We all know you’re not Rika! That doesn’t mean you’re any less important to us! It’s because of you we could throw another party!”

“She sounds like such a kind person…”

“You are, too! You put up with me confusing the two of you, right? You still loved me, didn’t you? You never once gave up on me!”

“But I’m not her…”

“And we don’t care! Everybody was so worried about you when we got your message! We’re lucky Seven found you over the surveillance cameras! I don’t know what I would have done if you- if you and Rika had-!” He stopped short, and she could hear his words latch in his throat.

She blinked and pulled one of her hands from his, wiping at her eyes because, honestly, her makeup was already smudged enough; she couldn’t make it much worse. “I know,” she hiccupped. “I know Rika’s death hurt all of you.”

“So why would you put us through that again?” She met his eyes then, and his purple hues weren’t even blinking. They were passionate and focused and the only time they moved was to take small glances at the rest of her face. Her lips fell open and closed again each time she tried to say something, but every word she could think of stuck like gum at the roof of her mouth. Yoosung’s eyes sharpened. “If you know how losing Rika made us feel, if you know what it did to me, why would you leave us, too?”

“I- I don’t know! I just thought…”

“You just thought we wouldn’t care? That we’d let you go? There’s no way! You’re a member of the RFA, now! You’re a part of our family! What kind of family would we be if we just let you leave us?”

He pulled her into his arms again, burying his head in the crook of her neck, arms snaking around her and squeezing her tightly, firmly, as though she’d slip from his clenched hands if he even began to let go. Her fingers twitched to reach up and touch the back of his neck, play with his hair and let her head fall against his, but she settled for laying her palms at his chest. They squeezed the vest he was wearing, and his fingers tangled into the back of her dress. Her eyes weren’t burning anymore. Though her tears hadn’t stopped entirely, they’d slowed to the occasional drip. “Yoosung, thank you…”

Their phones chirped—the signature messenger sound ringing on the bed and from Yoosung’s back pocket. They both jumped and pulled away, though she noted his chest was still set against her own. “I- um, sorry, I’ll just-!” He pulled his cell out and opened the app, eyes skimming the long list of messages the rest of the RFA had sent in panic. She watched his face, let her gaze follow the twitch of his adorable nose and the red of his cheeks, only vaguely wondering if her face was just as rosy.

Yoosung’s eyes widened. “Eh?” She watched as his face alternated between several different shades of the crimson that’d been there before. His head snapped around, looking from one wall to the next, barring his teeth and grunting with every turn he made.

Slowly, she reached out and took Yoosung’s phone from his hands, attempting to scroll down before she read anything else. Seven’s last message had been bumped up a slot, sitting right above the most recent text: _WOW! Yoosung has become such a man!_

It took her a moment of pause, she tilted her head, and then remembered—the surveillance cameras.

“Wha-? Seven!”

“This is an invasion of my privacy, you jerk!”

The tell-tale sound of Seven’s heart-eyed emoji resounded from their phones.


End file.
